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AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.8%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 7.1%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.
Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have found Machine Learning use cases are very nice."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Redshift are that its fast and efficient. We have lots of TBs of data and it's very fast."
"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."
"Amazon Redshift is very fast. It has really good response times. It's very user-friendly."
"Redshift has an advantage when it comes to administration, making it easier to manage and collaborate."
"You can copy JSON to the column and have it analyzed using simple functions."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"Amazon Redshift is a really powerful database system for reporting and data warehousing."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
 

Cons

"In our experiments, the handling of unstructured data was not very smooth."
"If you require a highly scalable solution, I would not recommend Amazon Redshift."
"Migrating data from other data sources can be challenging when you are working with multibyte character sets."
"Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful."
"The product could be improved by making it more flexible."
"There might be some limitations from a business intelligence perspective, but nothing we can't find a workaround for."
"In the next release, a pivot function would be a big help. It could save a lot of time creating a query or process to handle operations."
"What would make Amazon Redshift better is improvising on the pricing structure. For example, Acronis provides backups in cybersecurity, yet the pricing is a bit lesser than Amazon Redshift."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is reasonable. According to the RA3 cluster particularly, it provides 128 GB of storage with only four nodes. If you can manage your computations processes with the help of materialized views and proper queries. I think the IP clusters are very useful and overall fair for the price."
"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"In comparison to the price of similar solutions, Redshift's cost is the lowest."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"It's pay per use. You can have multiple models."
"The solution is available at a mid-range price compared to other vendors."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven."
"The cost must be improved."
"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
63%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.